Eric Hysen is a member of a new generation of recent college graduates whose questions about the future leave them unsatisfied with one-dimensional measurements. Individuals like these bring questions about the past to bear on speculation about how world-systems change on enormous scales. Indeed, Hysen is hoping to inaugurate exactly such a pivotal change in the institutions around him. Hysen’s role at Google is to oversee the development of open voting protocols and open government schemes. His group has established important landmarks for how Google can automate and scale the process of voluntary hacker groups opening up their government’s data, including setting up a digital infrastructure for licensing and sharing data across platforms.

To my mind, however, Hysen’s recent talk stops short in its ambitions of the broader vistas he sets us up for in his introduction. “We’re not living up to our potential,” Hysen states, throwing down the gauntlet. He looks back three hundred years, and comes up with the turnpike trust revolution of seventeenth-century England, which, as he states, helped to diminish the length of the average Cambridge student’s journey to London from two days to seven hours.

Now Hysen’s talk explicitly points to the first chapter of the transport revolution, the creation of turnpike trusts by parliament, as an example of how private enterprises working with government support can revolutionize an economic system. But much of what Hysen is interested in – the standardization of milestones, the straightening of paths, the leveling of hills and filling in of ditches in order to create flat roads and thus shorter journeys – was actually part of a slightly later revolution, not the turnpike revolution of 1660-1760, but the interkingdom highway revolution of 1785-1848. It’s that latter revolution that interested me, and I wrote a book about it, setting it out in the history of infrastructure from ancient Persia to the internet. I argued that the interkingdom highway revolution – not the turnpike trusts – was the revolution that gave us the modern economy as we know it today.

What separates the two revolutions is a difference in scale that shifted everything. In the turnpike revolution, a hundred road startups appeared and improved transportation for a few wealthy individuals, creating a map of affluent towns with cobblestone roads, kicking back the returns to their happy investors. In the interkingdom highway revolution, those small road startups were bought out and grafted together by a government initiative that had a radical new purpose. It wouldn’t be roads just for the few and wealthy any more. Now, roads would be built to the poorest communities, the ones that normally couldn’t afford to link up with prosperous markets.

Consider the implications for Google. Hysen has smart landmarks – interoperable data, more regular voluntary hackathon events – but few of them address this question of reaching people who are on the outside of the normal flow of capitalism. As a result, Silicon Valley money, whether working in California or Berlin or Bangalore, tends to create a bubble world of privileged software developers creating apps to buy and sell bangles or cars or the best bike routes, mainly catering to other privileged folk of their own race and class. Like the turnpike trusts of the seventeenth century, they improve a mile or two of road, serving a smooth ride to the the cream of the population. But for everyone else, life goes on unchanged.